


it doesn't end (through the wind)

by kimaracretak



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/F, Hopeful Ending, Hoth, In-Universe Mythology, Loyalty, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Sirens
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-02
Updated: 2018-12-02
Packaged: 2019-08-29 00:32:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16733610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimaracretak/pseuds/kimaracretak
Summary: The cold is far from the worst Hoth has to offer. Amilyn and Leia face it together.





	it doesn't end (through the wind)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [armsofthestorm](https://archiveofourown.org/users/armsofthestorm/gifts).



> I saw your 'myths, legends & fairytales' like and immediately started thinking about in-universe possibilities. I hope you like this :D

"You," Leia says, wriggling further up the bed so she can place her - sock-covered, still freezing - foot on Amilyn's stomach, "Are singing in your sleep again."

Amilyn, true to every other night this past week, gives absolutely no indication that she's heard Leia, continuing undaunted with her fragments of song. By now, Leia knows the words by heart, and she mouths them along with Amilyn even though something keeps her from joining in properly.

 _I love my love_  
_Deep down below_  
_I come for her_  
_Deep down below_.

Every night, and Amilyn never remembers in the morning. Leia's not really one for ghost stories, but the longer this goes on, the more convinced she is that something about Hoth is very, very wrong: Amilyn's normal memory for things that happen while she's asleep is accurate verging on uncanny.

"Tell your love she has competition," Leia says with a sigh, and yanks her pillow out from under her head to cover her face with it. "And tell her that some of us actually need sleep."

Amilyn sings on. Leia thinks about how dark it still is outside and idly contemplates the logistics of figuring out how to kill a figment of someone else's dream.

 

**

 

Breakfast that morning is a subdued affair. Leia gives up on sleep when the chrono reading still starts with 04, and everyone on Echo Base knows her well enough to give her table a wide berth. Amilyn stumbles in very nearly late, in shades of blue and pink mismatched in a way that hardly pretends to be purposeful.

She ignores the looks as she grabs caf and food and makes her way to Leia. "Good morning," she murmurs, setting her dishes down and sliding her arms around Leia's waist.

"Good," Leia echoes in disbelief, even as she leans back into Amilyn's embrace. "You know, sometimes I wish whatever kept you singing kept you awake, too."

"I only sing when I mean to," Amilyn says placidly, letting go of Leia for just long enough to sit down. " _I sing the story of the general and her ship of snow_ -"

Leia snorts with laughter, nearly choking on her own caf. "I may hold you to that one day. When you're tired of whatever deep down below nonsense you've gotten stuck in my head." She doesn't quite sing the words, but Amilyn narrows her eyes anyway.

"Deep down below," she murmurs, in perfect tune with her sleeping self. "Is that really what I've been saying?"

"Well," Leia sets her mug down carefully. "It's part of it, yeah. Haven't I said?" But as she thinks back she realises that, no, she probably hasn't: even just those three words are foreign in her mouth, in a way that no other language she's learned has been. Saying the words, even without singing them, it feels - wrong, even though Amilyn obviously doesn't feel the same.

"You haven't," Amilyn says thoughtfully. She's staring into her caf, lost in the sugar-crystal galaxies floating atop the rapidly cooling liquid. "But I remember now. I know that I -

 _I saw you there_  
_Deep down below_  
_We love and loved_  
_Deep down below_."

Leia shivers, the intensity of the song cutting through the base's heating and the layers of her indoor clothing. "Yeah, that's ... that's exactly what you've been saying."

There's a promise in Amilyn's words and an unfamiliar creeping dread in Leia's bones, like she's slowly being covered up with ice.

"Why do I know that?" Amilyn asks. "Why am I remembering now?" Her legs are idly swinging back and forth as she thinks, the soft leather of her boots brushing against Leia's ankles the only warm thing in the room.

"I don't know," Leia says, more to avoid lapsing into silence than anything else. The more she thinks about it the more she wonders if that remembering is a good thing.

Amilyn looks up, seeming more alive than Leia's seen her in a week, and her eyes are sparking like snow. "I need to do research."

"You - no, Amilyn we have -" But she's gone before Leia's gotten more than two words out, a glittering streak of purple heading for the door, caf in hand.

Leia drops her head to the table with a thud and pretends everyone else in the mess isn't looking at her.

 

**

 

"A song."

Mon Mothma looks more skeptical than Leia has seen her in months. "You want a day off for an on-planet expedition with Lieutenant Holdo because she ... got a song stuck in your head?"

Leia winces. Put that way it sounds the sort of ridiculous that would ordinarily make her suspect the soldier she was talking to of having been at the pilot's moonshine. "It's more that she can't stop singing. And that she doesn't remember singing. And ..." Leia hesitates over the last part, the part she had turned over and over in her mind on the way to Mothma's office, the part that she hopes is as absurd as it seems. "And I'm not sure it's even her singing, half the time."

No, that part definitely sounds worse out loud.

Mothma sighs, rubs her eyes as if that might make Leia's words more sensible. "If you were any other soldier ..." She trails off, and Leia fidgets and tries very hard to look like she's not any other soldier. Mothma carefully folds her hands on the desk and forces Leia to meet her gaze. "If you're not back by nightfall we won't send anyone for you."

It's a threat and a promise and proof of belief all at once, and Leia thinks briefly that she might die of it. "Won't be a problem, ma'am," she says. Saying it won't necessarily make it true, but she knows better than to ask for bad luck in the middle of a fight, especially one against an unknown enemy.

"It better not be," Mothma says, and that - that is absolutely a threat, one Leia can imagine the specifics of only too well: _Holdo's replaceable. You are, too, if only just - and if you throw it all away for her I'll never forgive you, nor myself for letting you_.

Leia gasps, nearly stumbling backwards with the sudden overwhelming certainty that she'd somehow unintentionally gotten far too close to the heart of Mothma's true feelings.

"We'll be back," Leia says again, trying to re-centre herself. "We'll find out what's going on, and we'll fix it, and we'll be back. It'll be better that way."

"Better," Mothma says with another sigh, but she knows the individual count of victories too intimately to argue. "May the Force be with you."

Leia inclines her head in acknowledgement, and tries not to look too eager to leave.

 

**

 

Amilyn's waiting for her outside, too poised to be hovering but far too excited to be accidental. "There you are!" she practically crows with delight, clasping Leia's cheeks between her gloved hands. "I've been waiting for you. Because -

 _I have a home_  
_Deep down below_  
_So safe and warm_  
_Deep down below_."

"Ammi," Leia says slowly. When had Amilyn's hands gotten so warm? "Please tell me you're joking."

"What?" Amilyn frowns. "No, I'm not joking. I was looking for you, because I started thinking, we know about the wampas and the tauntauns, of course, but they don't sing, so - sirens."

"Sirens?" The only sirens Leia had ever heard of were the ones said to haunt the hyperspace lanes out in the Unknown Regions.

"Yes," Amilyn says with pure delight, letting go of Leia's face so she can take her hand as they make their way through the labyrinthine corridors to the landspeeder docks. "Sirens. Beautiful creatures that sing of your heart's desire so truly that you don't notice when they kill you."

Leia shivers. Amilyn is, as usual, far too enamoured of murderous things. "Think I would have noticed if you were a mermaid - siren - thing, Ammi." But she can't shake the thought she'd had in Mothma's office, that Amilyn wasn't Amilyn when she was singing.

"I'm not saying I am. At least, I don't think I am." Amilyn swings their clasped hands gently as they walk, seemingly unconcerned at the prospect of being a siren. "But there must be some here, on Hoth, and I'm picking up their thoughts for some reason. Maybe in the Force?"

"That's not how the Force works," Leia says automatically, but even as the words leave her mouth, she wonders at their truth. "Or it shouldn't be."

"Why not?" Amilyn asks, the picture of innocence as she swipes them into the dock, and Leia is left feeling rather like she's conceded the sirens' presence on Hoth as a fact without quite meaning to. "It's all about connection, isn't it?"

"Well," Leia starts, but she can't actually dispute that. "Yes, but, it's not a, a, random telepathy thing, it's..."

" _It's like my home deep down below_ ," Amilyn sings softly, and Leia makes a frustrated noise and leans in to silence her with a kiss.

Amilyn's lips are cold, for all she kisses back with the ease of familiarity. It feels normal, and comfortable, and all sorts of things Leia can't quite reconcile with how strange Amilyn has been acting the past few days.

Amilyn hums contentedly as Leia's tongue presses past her parted lips, and Leia feels the sharp-soft scrape of Amilyn's teeth against her bottom lip. Time alone is hard to come by in the Resistance, and harder still on Echo Base, and this is the first proper kiss they've shared in what feels like an eternity, but is probably just a few months. Long enough, at least, that Leia has the fleeting thought that they should, perhaps, simply stay here, let their kisses be the antidote to whatever Amilyn has been struggling with.

But she knows better, even when she doesn't want to. "What was that for?" Amilyn asks, when Leia finally breaks the kiss. She's still holding Leia close, blue eyes shining down like stars for Leia to drown in. "Why ... are we in the landspeeder dock?"

And her hands are fisted in the back of Leia's coat, fingertips like unnaturally hot coals burning into Leia's skin through the layers of fabric.

And just like that, reality comes crashing back in, harsh as the wind through the cracks in the durasteel of the outer walls.

"Stars, Amilyn," Leia whispers, hugging her tight and feeling the hot press of Amilyn's cheek against the top of her head. "What's going on?"

She doesn't expect an answer beyond Amilyn's heartbeat, but Amilyn speaks anyway. "I was doing research," she says. "After breakfast. I was thinking about sirens, because Hoth shares significant patterns of winter constellation variation with the planets where they're found, and

 _I know they're here_  
_Deep down below_  
_We'll join them there_  
_Deep down be-_ "

Leia kisses her again, not bothering to disguise the edge of panic she feels. Nothing she's faced has given her any idea how to deal with this, with Amilyn slipping further and further away into some dreamscape that Leia can't begin to understand how to follow her through.

And Amilyn still kisses her back like there's nothing wrong, like nothing could ever be wrong.

"I know about the sirens," Leia says helplessly. "You told me, before you started singing again. And then you just ... float away, and you can't tell that anything's wrong."

Amilyn's brow furrows in confusion. "I don't like forgetting," she says, the closest to scared that Leia thinks she's ever seen her.

"I know," Leia says, reaching up to run a comforting hand through Amilyn's curls. "I know. That's why I'm here. We're gonna take a speeder and find these sirens of yours and figure out what's going on, okay?"

Amilyn won't quite meet her eyes. "Outside," she murmurs. "They told me about that too.

 _You'll travel far_  
_Deep down below_  
_I'll love you there_  
_Deep down below_."

"No," Leia says firmly, and only the knowledge of how much Amilyn enjoys having her hair pulled keeps her from yanking on the neon blue curls still in her hand. "You're not going down wherever, and you're not taking me down there either." She gets up on her tiptoes, tugs gently on Amilyn's hair until her lips are pressed against Amilyn's ear. "You're mine," she whispers fiercely. "Mine, and no siren, no ice planet is going to take you from me."

It's an imperfect echo of what Amilyn promised her the first night they slept together, that no Empire and no destroyed X-Wing would keep them apart, and it seems to spark some kind of memory in Amilyn, because her eyes clear, just enough for Leia to begin to hope again.

"You're right," she says firmly, and Leia resists the urge to bounce up and down with joy. "We'll figure this out together, won't we?"

"Yes," Leia agrees, and can't help but kiss her again with delight. "We will, and you'll be fine."

 _You'll be mine_.


End file.
